Many communities in the metro area participate in the HEARTSafe program, including Apple Valley, Bloomington, Coon Rapids, Golden Valley, Minnetonka, East Bethel, Savage, Shakopee, and Woodbury (see http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/healthimprovement/programs-initiatives/in-communities/heartsafe.h... for a current list). The HEARTSafe Communities program promotes survival from sudden out-of-hospital cardiac arrest through widespread CPR instruction, public access defibrillators, and aggressive resuscitation protocols for first responders and area hospitals.

Individual HEARTSafe communities have made an effort to promote the placement of Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) in public locations and there are decentralized efforts to track where those devices have been placed.

The goal of this project would be to develop a model for storing AED locations, facilitating the process of keeping the locations current, and making them accessible to the public through a mapping application. A model project could be adopted by individual communities or data could be shared across all metro locations.

With so many AEDs out there, this really could benefit from becoming a crowdsourcing effort with two parts: 1) identify locations and 2) "adopt" an AED and/or a building in order to commit to keeping it updated. I can see an Ushahidi platform hosted by AHA.

We have some data for AED locations at UMN and in Coon Rapids provided by the MN Resuscitation Consortium Program Manager Kim Harkins. Please see a Geo:Code 2.0 team member for access to this data once we move into project work time Saturday morning.